Archive of Our Own

1.

Her father had warned Lenora about strangers.

Many times, actually, as though the lesson might go bad like the milk in the back of the fridge if he didn't say it again. Don't open the door for anyone, Lenora, I'm serious. Not the mailman, not the neighbors—what do we do if someone we don't know tries to talk to us? And she would say the right things back in the right order because she'd memorized them ages ago, probably from birth, and if she said them fast enough he'd stop asking and let her go back to what she was doing.

It wasn't as though Lenora wanted to talk to strangers. She didn't particularly want to talk to anyone who wasn't her dad, her mom, or Kate—which was apparently a problem, because Mrs. Hutchins had called home about it. Lenora knew because her mom had done the couch thing: sitting on the very edge of the cushion with her hands folded in a way that meant something bad was about to be discussed, wanting to know if there was ‘something going on’.

Her dad had stood in the kitchen doorway with the dishtowel over his shoulder, doing that other thing where he pretended not to listen but obviously was, and Lenora had explained—plainly, because she was not a baby—that the other kids were loud and annoying and kept taking her good pencils from her pouch when they thought she wasn't looking. The purple felt ones. That she'd paid for with her own allowance.

She left out the part about Kate offering to beat them up for her, because that would've started a whole different couch conversation.

Lenora didn't mind being alone. She liked it, actually—her room, her paints, the way the brush made color go where she told it to. Which is how she found herself now: cross-legged on the living room floor of her dad's Stamford house, a half-finished painting drying on newspaper in front of her that was either a forest or a swamp depending on how you tilted your head. The kitchen radio he'd forgotten to turn off was talking about something boring—weather, probably—and the window was cracked open just enough that the air smelled like the neighbor's yard clippings and her mom’s chrysanthemums.

A perfect morning—or would have been, had she not woken up gross and sweaty at six, the kind of sweaty that meant sick and not just too-many-blankets. Her dad's hand had been rough and comfortingly cold against her forehead, and a thermometer was stuck under her tongue for good measure. Then he'd said a hundred degrees in his serious voice, which meant no school, which should have been exciting except it wasn't because her throat felt like she'd swallowed a pinecone.

He'd torn apart the bathroom medicine cabinet looking for something—knocking a box of Band-Aids into the sink, which Lenora could've told him were behind the extra toothpaste if he'd asked—and produced the last bit of disgusting grape syrup from a bottle she was pretty sure had been in there since she was five. Kate had stood by the front door already wearing her backpack, making a face that was hard to describe as anything other than glad it's not me. Their dad had kissed Lenora's hot forehead twice and pointed at her on the way out—I'll bring more medicine, do NOT open the door, I mean it—

The clambering from the living room window is what made her head jerk up.

A man—pulling himself through the gap with a grunt, one leg already over the sill, his nice shoe scuffing the paint. Lenora scrambled to her feet so fast her vision went swimmy and wrong, the room doing that tilty thing it had been doing all morning, and she stuck her paintbrush out in front of her like a sword. Cadmium yellow paint dripped on the carpet, which she was probably going to get in trouble for later, but that was a later problem.

But this man—this man was not a stranger.

It was just this was the first time he'd entered their house through the window.

"What are you doing here?" Lenora demanded, or tried to. Her voice came out stuffed and thick and completely wrong, like talking through a sock, which ruined it.

He looked up at her. Frozen mid-climb, one hand on the sill, the other gripping the frame, coat all bunched up around his middle—just as surprised to see her as she was to see him, which didn't seem fair, since it was her house.

The man had called himself Armand, once. He was tall—nearly as tall as her dad, and he dressed like a business man, in stiff, too clean clothes. He had rich brown skin, and eyes that were the wrong color for a person: wide and bright, the exact shade of the apricots her mom put in her lunchbox in summer. Lenora had looked, hard, at every grown-up she'd met since, and nobody else had eyes like that. She'd even checked her teacher and the man at the gas station and the dentist, just to be sure.

(He'd been around for as long as she could remember, if she was being honest. Not around like her dad was around, but around like a song stuck in the back of her head—across the street while she waited for the school bus, three aisles over at ShopRite looking at cereal, walking through the park or feeding the ducks. He'd been in the house before, too—never when dad was home, but Armand had said he was allowed and he didn’t steal anything or harm her. And when she was six and bad dreams had woken her up in the dark he'd made her a peanut butter sandwich without being asked; had lifted her onto the counter and let her tell him about the monsters until she wasn't scared anymore. Then he'd left without saying goodbye, like he'd never been there, and in the morning the only proof was the plate in the sink and the peanut butter knife she couldn't reach to put away.)

Lenora lowered the paintbrush half an inch. "We have a front door, you know,"

"What are you doing here?" he countered, accented voice still a little jarring to hear.

"I live here."

The man pulled himself the rest of the way through the window with considerably less grace than someone that well-dressed should probably have—one shoe catching the sill, his knee banging the radiator beneath it with a muffled clang that made him suck air through his teeth.

He straightened, tugging his coat back into place like nothing had happened, and looked down at her with that particular expression grown-ups got when they found a child somewhere a child wasn't supposed to be. Which was rude, considering.

"Are you not supposed to be at school?"

Lenora frowned. "I'm sick."

She sniffed—hard, and snottily—and was only a little delighted when Armand's mouth twisted with visible disgust, his chin pulling back like she'd shoved something dead under his nose. Good.

His gaze traveled over her: the robin egg blue American Girl sweatshirt that was technically Kate's and hung past her wrists because Kate was eleven and Lenora was built, according to her grandmother, like a little bird and her favorite ladybug pajama pants with matching socks didn’t help her bony frame.

"Where is your father?" He asked it stiffly, arms crossing over his chest in a way that suggested he was the one who should be cross, which was ridiculous. He was the one climbing through windows. Lenora had been minding her own business.

She dropped back down to the carpet without answering right away—cross-legged again, knees cracking the newspaper, because the unfinished forest still needed another pine tree and it wasn't going to paint itself. It didn't look the way it was supposed to. Not the way it had in her dream, this night or the night before, or the one before that—something about the colors was wrong, too bright or too flat, and the trees didn't have the same feeling as the ones behind her eyelids, the dark ones with silver bark that went on forever and had knots that looked like people’s faces.

"Dropping my sister off at school and getting me medicine," she said, dabbing Sweet Pea Green on the new tree, tongue caught between her teeth. She tilted her head. Still wrong. "He said he'd be back by ten."

Armand's gaze flicked to the clock on the wall—the one shaped like a birdhouse that her dad kept saying he was going to take down and never did, because Lenora liked it, and because it made a different bird call every hour. In thirty minutes it would be the tufted titmouse. That was her second favorite, after the cardinal at noon.

"Are you supposed to be painting on the coffee table?" Armand sniffed, in the tone of someone who already knew the answer. "Don't you have an easel?"

Lenora looked down at her paints. At her paper. She had put newspaper down first, like her dad told her to—she wasn't an animal—flattened it out neatly across the glass and everything, even tucked the edges under so they wouldn't curl. The issue was not the coffee table. The issue was significantly worse.

She had been gifted an easel for her sixth birthday. A real one, wooden, with a big roll of paper on top that you could tear off in sheets and legs that folded up for storage but she never folded them because the easel lived in the corner of her room permanently, like furniture. She liked her easel very much. It was perhaps her most important possession after her paints and before her rock collection. But there was a problem with it she had discovered this morning—quite upsettingly, standing barefoot in her doorway with a tissue balled in her fist—that made it no longer usable, possibly ever again.

"It's not my easel anymore," Lenora explained, woeful, dipping her brush into the plastic cup she'd been told specifically was for paint water and not for drinking, even though it was only that one time and she hadn't swallowed.

Armand crossed to the other side of the coffee table and lowered himself onto the couch. He braced his arms on his knees, leaning forward, attempting—at least—to look interested in the swamp-forest taking shape on the newspaper.

"How so?"

Lenora sat back on her ankles, holding the brush away at a careful angle so it wouldn't drip water onto the paper and ruin the new pine tree. She glanced at the hallway—as though her father might materialize to overhear—and then leaned forward, conspiratorial.

"There was a bug on it."

Armand raised an eyebrow, looking as personally offended as if she'd said it was on him. "A bug?"

"A big one." Lenora held her thumb and forefinger apart to demonstrate, then widened the gap another inch, because honesty mattered less than conveying the full horror of the experience. "With legs. Lots of them. It was sitting right on the paper roll and it looked at me, and now—" she shook her head gravely, dipping the brush back in the cup. "I can't go back in there."

"I see," Armand said, with the gravity of someone who had been presented with a serious tactical problem. He studied her for a moment. "Do you want to be rid of it?"

Lenora worried her lip. "I don't want to hurt it."

"Naturally."

"It's just—it can't live there. On my easel. That's my easel." She jabbed the brush at the hallway for emphasis, a droplet of Sweet Pea Green arcing through the air and landing on the newspaper with a fat splat. "And it won't leave. I asked."

Armand blinked. "You asked?"

"Twice." She held up the corresponding number of fingers, in case he needed a visual. "And then it moved one of its legs—like, at me—and I shut the door."

"Reasonable enough,”

"I'm not scared of it," Lenora clarified, hotly, because she wasn't. She was not. It was a matter of principle. The bug had been asked to leave, politely, and it had chosen stay, and now there were consequences. "I just don't think we can live together anymore."

Something shifted in Armand's face—a flicker behind the apricot eyes, there and then not, quick as a blink. His mouth twitched at one corner in a way that could have been a smile if it had committed to the job. He stood from the couch, brushing nothing visible off the front of his coat—habit, probably, since the man didn't seem like the type to tolerate wrinkles—and tilted his head towards the hallway.

"Show me."

Lenora squinted up at him. "You're going to get rid of it?"

"I am going to relocate it," he corrected, "since you've been generous enough to grant it clemency. Where is your room?"

She took her brush in hand and led him down the hallway, socked feet quiet on the wood floor, stopping short a good three feet from her bedroom door. It was still closed. She'd stuffed one of Kate's old t-shirts in the gap at the bottom—just in case the thing had legs enough to be fast, which she suspected it did.

"In there," Lenora pointed, like a general sending someone else over the hill. She stayed just behind Armand, close enough that she could hide behind the tails of his nice coat. "It was on the paper roll part. The top."

Armand regarded the closed door, the stuffed t-shirt barricade, the star stickers plastered all over the white paint. He reached for the door handle and Lenora gasped with a newfound fear.

"What if it's on the ceiling now?"

"Then I will look at the ceiling." replied Armand simply.

"What if it flies?"

He paused, hand on the knob, and looked down at her over his shoulder. Lenora had both fists knotted in the back of his coat now, peering around his hip with one eye, the paintbrush still clutched in her grip like a talisman. She must have looked sufficiently pitiful—fever-pink and snotty and genuinely distressed—because something in his expression softened by a degree so small she might've imagined it.

"Lenora," he said, with the measured patience of someone who was not naturally patient. "I have contended with creatures far more terrible than whatever is living on your easel."

"You don't know that. You haven't seen it yet."

He opened the door.

Her bedroom was exactly as she'd left it that morning—which was to say, a disaster, though Lenora maintained it was an organized disaster and resented anyone who suggested otherwise. The bed was a tangle of her blue comforter half-dragged to the floor, stuffed animals from the nearby aquarium gift shop heaped against the wall in a defensive formation. Books stacked in piles that had a system only she understood. Drawings tacked and taped to every available surface—some hers, some Kate's, some torn carefully from magazines. The rock collection lined up on her windowsill in order of how interesting they were, the quartz at the front because it caught the light. A breeze lifted the gauzy flower curtains of her open window.

And the easel, in the corner, exactly where it always stood. Innocent-looking, if you didn't know.

Lenora could see the bug from her spot on the threshold, toes not daring to cross onto the carpet.

"There," she whispered, pointing with her whole arm, as though he might somehow miss it. "On the paper. See? I told you it was big."

It was—in fairness—that big. It was bigger than the beetles in her mother’s garden, or the pill bugs that she liked to follow on her dad’s driveway in the summer. It was bigger than the spider that had a web in the cellar and the bees that liked her neighbors’ flowers.

It was, in fact, the biggest bug Lenora had ever seen in her entire life, which was eight years, and she had seen a lot of bugs.

"Ah," he said.

"See?"

This thing was green—the aggressive, show-off kind of green, like it wanted her to know it was there—with a long body and a triangle-shaped head that swiveled. That was the worst part: the swiveling. It had turned and looked at her this morning with its horrible little face, front legs folded up against its chest like it was praying, like it had the nerve to make her room its chapel. The whole effect was of something that was pretending very hard to be polite while deciding whether or not to commit a crime.

Armand stepped into the room. Lenora held her breath.

He approached the easel the way someone in a movie might approach a bomb: slowly, hands loose at his sides, head tilted. The mantis did not move. Armand did not move. They seemed, for a horrible second, to be regarding each other with mutual assessment, which was the worst possible development, because it confirmed Lenora's suspicion that the thing was intelligent.

"Ah," Armand said, bending down, eye-level with the paper roll. "A mantis."

"I know what it is."

"They're quite remarkable, actually. Excellent hunters—the only insect that can turn its head to look over its own shoulder." He said this with a note of genuine admiration that Lenora found borderline treasonous.

"It looked at me."

"Yes. That's what makes them interesting. Most insects cannot."

"I don't want it to be interesting. I want it to not be on my easel."

Armand extended his hand and let his fingers hover just beneath the mantis's folded legs. The creature considered him. Swiveled. Considered some more. Then it stepped onto his palm with the dainty, unhurried certainty of someone accepting an invitation to dance, its spindly legs pricking across his skin as it settled itself between his thumb and forefinger like it belonged there.

Lenora gasped.

"There," Armand said, crouching so he was now nearly her height. "Perfectly docile. You see?"

"I see it moving."

"Would you like to hold it?"

"No."

"It won't hurt you," he said, regarding the bug on his hand with a neutrality that stumped Lenora’s tired mind. The mantis flexed one of its prayer-arms and went still again. "They have no interest in biting humans. You are far too large a meal."

"That's not making me feel better."

"It wasn't meant to. It's a fact."

Lenora shifted her weight on the threshold, toes curling into the carpet edge. Her nose was running again—she wiped it on the sleeve of Kate's sweatshirt, which Kate would kill her for, but Kate wasn't here and the tissue box was on her nightstand behind enemy lines. The mantis sat on Armand's hand like a little green king on a throne, and the truly infuriating thing was that it looked comfortable. Relaxed, even. Like it hadn't just ruined her entire morning and possibly her whole relationship with her bedroom.

"How come it likes you?" she asked, suspicious.

"I have a way with unpleasant creatures."

She wasn't sure if he was joking. It was hard to tell with Armand, because his face did the same thing whether he was being funny or being serious, which was almost nothing. He shifted on his heels, bringing the mantis closer—not pushing, just there, at the edge of her space, the way he seemed to do everything.

The creature's antennae waved gently in her direction like it was tasting the air between them.

Lenora leaned back. Then forward again—just barely, just enough that she could see the weird texture of its eyes up close, the way the light made them look like little dark gems. Its front legs twitched, and she flinched, but it was only rearranging itself on Armand's knuckle, settling in.

“Do you promise it won’t hurt me?”

“I promise,” He held out his free hand, “Give me your hands,”

She gave him her hand, fingers curled half-shut, shoulders up near her ears. Armand took them anyway, his grip cool and dry and impossibly careful, like he was used to handling things that could break. He turned her palms up between them, pressing gently at the stubborn curl of her fingers until they opened—paint-stained, a little clammy from the fever, a scab on her left thumb from where she'd picked at a mosquito bite Kate had told her not to pick at.

"Still," he said, which was easy for him to say, because he wasn't the one about to have a bug on him.

The mantis considered the offering. Its head swiveled—the whole triangle of it, rotating in that horrible boneless way, like something out of the alien movie Kate had let her watch a piece of last Halloween before their mom had come downstairs and caught them. Lenora's breath caught. She could feel the individual beats of her heart in her fingertips where they were pressed to Armand's palm.

"It's looking at me."

"Yes."

"Why is it looking at me?"

"Because you are looking at it. They are very polite, in that way."

The mantis moved—a single dainty step from his knuckle to the bridge of her fingers, and Lenora sucked in a breath so sharp through her plugged nose that it whistled. Its feet were almost nothing. Less than nothing—like being touched by the thought of being touched; six pin-prick points of pressure traveling slowly across the back of her hand, its body swaying with each step the way the old rope bridge at the playground did when you walked too fast.

"Oh," she said, very quietly, in case loud noises made it bite. Did mantises bite? She didn't know. She should've asked that before she let him put it on her. "Oh, it—it tickles."

"Mm."

She watched it travel the length of her index finger and pause at the nail, its front legs lifting to clean its own face fussily, mechanical scrubbing. Lenora exhaled, slow and shaky, not daring to move. The mantis was green—not Crayola green, not crayon green, but the kind you couldn't mix right no matter how hard you tried: alive-green, with a belly like a piece of light trapped in a leaf.

"She's pretty," Lenora whispered.

"He."

"How do you know?"

"The females are much larger. And considerably meaner."

Lenora considered this. "Like Kate."

That did get a small chuckle from Armand and Lenora felt pride bloom through her. She slid slowly down the side of her bed until she was sat on the carpeted floor of her bedroom with the mantis in hand.

Armand must have taken that as permission and dropped to the floor with her, back against her wardrobe, long legs let out in front of him.

“It’s kinda like the creature from my dreams,” Lenora remarked, tilting her hand to watch the mantis navigate the geography of her knuckles.

Armand, who had been inspecting something on the cuff of his sleeve, went very still.

"You have a creature in your dreams?" he repeated.

It shouldn’t have been as off putting as it felt. Mom had said kids have weird dreams all the time. That she was just unique in the way that sometimes she saw them play out in real life. Like when she'd dreamed about the big tree in the Hendersons' yard falling down and then it did, three days later, right onto their minivan. Kate had said it was a coincidence. Dad had said nothing, which was worse, because Dad always had something to say about everything—what she ate, what she watched, how close she stood to the road—and his nothing was louder than all of it put together.

“The creature isn’t a bug though. At least I don’t think so,” Lenora continued. “She’s big and tall. I can never see her clearly because it’s always in the shadows and it never listens to me. She just watches me,”

Lenora frowned, trying to get the shape of it right in her head. It was hard to explain dream-things to awake-people; they always came out flattened, like trying to describe a color to someone who hadn't seen it. "Sometimes she has lots of arms. Or legs. I can't tell which. And her eyes are—"

She stopped, glancing up at Armand. “They’re kinda like yours,”

Armand did not move. The air between them changed, though Lenora couldn't have said how—only that it felt heavier, suddenly, like right before a thunderstorm when the sky goes yellow-green and the birds all shut up at once.

"Like mine?”

Lenora nodded, “Yeah. Sort of goldish? But also—" She scrunched her face, hunting for the word. "Orangey. Like when you hold a flashlight behind your hand and your fingers go all see-through and glowy." She demonstrated with her free hand, holding it up to the window light, splaying her fingers apart.

"Does she frighten you?" His voice was careful now.

Frowning, Lenora turned his question over in her mind. The creature, woman, thing had scared her once. But that was only when she first started appearing in her dreams. Now, she was just there, Lenora could almost count on seeing her there most nights. Watching Lenora watch something much scarier happen in front of her.

"Not anymore," Lenora said, and meant it—though the anymore part was doing a lot of heavy lifting, because there had been a first time, and it had been awful.

"She just watches," Lenora continued, quieter. The mantis had gone still on her wrist, his little triangle head pointed at Armand like he was listening too. "And the dreams are always bad ones. Not her—the dream is. There's always something horrible happening and I can't stop it and I can't look away and she's just—there. In the corner. Or behind me. Standing."

She held up her free hand for the mantis to wobble onto. "One time I dreamt the school flooded. Like, really flooded—water up to the ceiling and everybody was swimming and screaming and I couldn't find Kate anywhere. And the creature was just there standing in it all watching it all happen,”

“Is she the one doing it? Making the bad things happen?”

Lifting her shoulders into a shrug, Lenora sniffed, “I don’t know,”

Armand's jaw did something very small. If Lenora hadn't been looking right at him she would've missed it—a tightening, way back near his ear, like he'd bit down on something he didn't want to swallow.

"And the school," he said. "The flood."

"Yeah?"

"Did it happen?"

Lenora went quiet. The mantis had stopped moving entirely, perched like a tiny green statue on the back of her hand, and she focused on counting the segments of his legs because that was easier than looking at Armand while she answered.

“Not yet,”

Outside a grackle cawed and was responded to. The window creaked with the breeze that wafted through. Then the crunch of gravel as a heavy automobile rumbled over the driveway.

Lenora’s head shot up to look at Armand who caught her gaze.

“My dad’s home,” Lenora whispered.

The man was on his feet in a second, faster than Lenora could blink. He ushered her up. Lenora trying hard to keep the bug from getting agitated.

“Put the mantis out the window, quickly,”

"But—"

"Lenora." His voice had changed—not mean, not loud, but the kind of firm that didn't leave room for arguing, the kind her dad used right before something became a Because I said so. Armand was already moving, pressing flat between her shoulder blades to steer her towards the window. "Now, please."

She went, because his please didn't sound like a please at all—it sounded like the opposite of one, actually, dressed up in nice clothes the way he was. Lenora cupped the mantis carefully in both hands and leaned over the sill, feeling the cool air hit her feverish face as she tipped her palms towards the azalea bush below. The mantis sat there for a moment, unbothered, cleaning his stupid face like nobody in this house had anywhere to be.

"Go," she hissed, giving her hands a tiny shake. The mantis regarded her with one swiveling eye, deeply unimpressed, and finally picked his way off her thumb and onto a leaf. "Okay. Bye. Sorry."

“Into bed,” ordered Armand. But Lenora’s attention was on the doorway.

“What about my paints? My art? Dad is gonna kill me!” She stressed. The car door slammed from outside.

Armand couldn’t seem to help the agitation that crossed his face. “I’ll take of it. Get into bed,”

She wanted to argue—had several good points queued up about how the yellow paint on the carpet was going to be a whole entire thing and also the newspaper was still spread out and also she hadn't even cleaned the brushes yet, and if you didn't clean them right away the paint dried in the bristles and ruined them forever, her mom had told her that—but Armand's hand was already on the back of her neck, firm and steering, and her feet were moving before her mouth caught up.

Lenora scrambled under the covers still in her paint-stained pajamas, yanking the comforter up to her chin like a shield. Her forehead was pounding again—the fever swelling back now that the adrenaline was subsiding.

There was a snap—loud and sharp, like a branch breaking underfoot—and then he was just not there.

Lenora stared at the spot where Armand had been standing half a second ago, which was now just her bedroom floor and a rectangle of afternoon light from the window and absolutely no tall man in expensive clothes whatsoever. She might've thought she imagined the whole thing—the mantis, the dreams, all of it—except for the evidence: her favorite paintbrush, the thin one with the good point that she used for details and leaves and the tiny veins inside flower petals, snapped clean in two on the carpet. Right where his shoe had been.

She wiggled out from under the comforter and dropped to her knees, gathering up both halves. The bristle end was fine, mostly—just the wooden handle broken at the middle, a pale splintery mouth where the two pieces used to be one. She carried them back to bed like an injured bird, laying them across her lap and fitting the broken ends together, which didn't do anything useful but felt important to try.

Armand reappeared.

Not from the hallway, not from the door—just back, suddenly, in the way that only he seemed to be able to do, arms full of her stuff: the painting, the newspaper, the plastic cups of murky paint water, the whole tray of Crayolas—all of it gathered and deposited onto her small desk in one efficient, soundless trip that should not have been possible given the amount of things he was carrying.

Lenora opened her mouth to ask how he'd gotten downstairs and back up again without a sound, but the question dissolved when she looked back down at the two halves in her lap.

"You broke it," she said. Not angry—she wasn't, not really—but her mouth did the thing it did when she was upset about something she'd already decided not to cry about: pulling sideways, all lopsided.

Armand turned from the desk. His eyes dropped to the broken brush in her hands, and something moved through his expression—quick and strange, too big for what it was. It was just a paintbrush. It cost maybe three dollars. But the look on his face was like he'd knocked over something irreplaceable in a museum and the alarm was about to go off.

"I apologize," he said, sounding truly guilty about it.

Lenora shrugged, tucking the halves under her stingray plushie’s fins arm for safekeeping. "'S okay. I have others."

Which was true. She had a whole cup of them on her desk, different sizes and colors, some of them already kind of messed up from not cleaning them fast enough. But that one had been the good one, and they both knew it.

He was already at the window—one leg over the sill, coat hitched up again, the mirror image of how he'd arrived except quieter somehow, like he'd had practice at leaving.

"Wait," Lenora whisper-yelled. "Wait."

He paused. One apricot eye over his shoulder, the rest of him already belonging to the outside.

"Will I see you again?"

She hadn't meant for it to come out small. It just did—fever-thin and wobbly, the kind of voice she hated using because it was the voice that made grown-ups pat her head and say oh, sweetheart, and she was not an oh, sweetheart kind of person.

Something shifted in his face. Not a flinch, not a smile—more like watching ice crack on a puddle in early spring, where you could see the dark water underneath for just a second before it sealed back up. "I think it best if we don't."

Still—she tried again, because she was eight and stubborn and her dad said she could argue the paint off a wall. "What if I find another bug in my room?"

The corner of his mouth did something almost-shaped like a smile. "Then you will know how best to help it."

"Really?"

"Really."

Only slightly crestfallen Lenora nodded, pulling the comforter higher. The sleepiness was winning now, heavy and warm behind her eyes, the fever dragging her down like a hand on her shoulder pressing gently into the mattress. Armand swung his other leg through, balanced on the sill with a grace that should've looked ridiculous for a grown man in nice clothes climbing out of a child's bedroom window but somehow didn't.

He stopped. Fingers curled on the frame, half-swallowed by the late afternoon light, the garden and the neighbor's yard and the whole normal world waiting below him.

"I am sorry about the paintbrush," he said—again, like the first time hadn't been enough, like sorry was something that needed to be applied in multiple coats to stick.

Lenora shrugged, already sinking. Her eyelids were doing the thing where they closed on their own and she had to keep yanking them back open, which was a losing battle and she knew it. She yawned into her fist, jaw cracking. "'S okay."

He smiled—brief, there and gone, a flash of something warm in those wrong-colored eyes. "Get some rest, Lenora. Sleep well."

She nodded, meaning to watch him go—wanting to see how he did it, if he dropped or climbed or just disappeared the way he had earlier—but her eyes slipped shut for what felt like one second, and when she dragged them open again the window was empty. Just the curtain moving in the breeze, and the smell of mulch, and the faraway sound of a lawn mower starting up somewhere down the block.

Gone. For real this time—she could feel it, the way you could feel when someone left a room even with your back turned, the air going lighter and looser where they used to be.

By the time she'd burrowed back into the sheets, tucked the stingray under her chin, and let the fever pull her properly under—her dad's shape filled the doorway. Just a blur of him at first, soft around the edges the way everything got when she was this tired: broad shoulders and the rustle of a plastic bag and the particular huff of breath he made after climbing the stairs too fast, which he always did, even though he complained about his knees every single time.

"Lenny? You awake, bug?"

She was deemed well enough for school the next morning—fever broken overnight like a spell, sunny and bright-eyed at the breakfast table as if the whole miserable ordeal had been someone else's problem entirely. Lenora had bounded through the front door that afternoon with paint-stained intention, shoes kicked off in the hallway, bag tossed to the foot of her bed.

She'd already yanked a fresh sheet of paper down from the shelf and was reaching for her brush roll when her fingers found something unfamiliar among the others: new, fancy—the handle a sleek, polished wood that caught the light from her window, dark and warm as honey. A small red bow cinched neatly around its middle, the kind tied by someone who had thought about it first.

The post-it was stuck to her desk, slightly crooked, in handwriting.

To replace your broken brush. Keep painting. – A

Her grin came on quick and toothy and she plucked the bow off, uncapped her paints, and got to work.